“Recovery Summer”–time Blues: Wage Deflation and Peak Opportunity


As the Obama administration’s much-touted “Recovery Summer” reaches its zenith, one is led to ask, At what point does economic recovery become simply a more gently modulated decline?

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most — that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least. — Eugene V. Debs

A heat wave grips New England, making the days downright tropical. Thunderstorms, which come daily, bring no relief, only a kind of steamy weight and closeness. Air becomes almost too heavy to breathe. Everything is obscenely green, bringing to mind those films Werner Herzog made with Klaus Kinski in South America.

Under such estival oppression my mind drifts to — and lingers over — perverse themes. I find myself wishing for something Conradian: a glimpse into the heart of darkness; a confrontation with nature redacted to its essence, stripped of the borrowed finery of civil society.

Whither tarries, I wonder, the “Summer of Rage” predicted for this year, as it was for last? Some malcontents in France seem to have gotten their blood up in a reprise of the riots of 2005 (the 2005 uprising inspired this tract by The Invisible Committee, a collective of ultra-Left Jeremiahs intent on pricking the consciences of complacent bourgeois Ninevites), but nothing so piquant loomed for us stateside. Extreme heat dulls keener emotions and turns even the slightest action into a chore. But wilting under the sun is not just the person cursed to live in a home without air conditioning; opportunity shrivels also, the much touted “Recovery Summer” now appearing more as “Recumbency Summer” as budget crises bring rumors of rolling closures of firehouses in Philadelphia, as well as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s threat to bust state workers down several pay grades. Read the rest of this entry »

Children of the Devolution: Our Era of Neoliberal Narcissists and Tech-Savvy Troglodytes


Could it be that the real affliction gripping people these days is not disease or poverty, but media-induced sociopathy?

I can’t say I was terribly surprised to read the lede, “A three-decade analysis of prior research reveals that American college students are not quite as empathetic as they used to be,” in this May 28, 2010 U.S. News and World Report article. The news hit me with all of the impact of a wet firecracker, to quote the Silkworm song. As someone who spent a decade teaching in universities, I could only react with the bemusement, experienced all too frequently in these modern times, that comes whenever a study is released which simply confirms what you’ve known all along. (“MIT researchers have published the results of a five-year study that has conclusively determined that rain is wet!”)

Still, the fact that I considered this announcement a foregone conclusion didn’t keep me from reading the whole story. I pressed on to see if I could glean any choice nuggets of insight. Statistic-laden details tend to give a certain weight to subjective impressions. Maybe the French philosopher Michel Foucault is right; creatures of an empiricism-dominated episteme find great solace in having their individual judgments bolstered by data. Read the rest of this entry »

The Revolution Will Not Be Amortized: Deleveraging the New Age of Populist Rage


Have conditions ripened to the point where world revolution has become inevitable, or will the global financial elite save their bacon by throwing a few of their own to the angry hordes?

The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly were two men, whose faces, as their long hair Rapped back when the whirlings of the grindstone brought their faces up, were more horrible and cruel than the visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous disguise. False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep. As these ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung forward over their eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some women held wine to their mouths that they might drink; and what with dropping blood, and what with dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks struck out of the stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire. The eye could not detect one creature in the group free from the smear of blood. Shouldering one another to get next at the sharpening-stone, were men stripped to the waist, with the stain all over their limbs and bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the stain upon those rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women’s lace and silk and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through and through. Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red with it. Some of the hacked swords were tied to the wrists of those who carried them, with strips of linen and fragments of dress: ligatures various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And as the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in their frenzied eyes; — eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun. — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The author of a 2004 book on the French Revolution, British historian Simon Schama is well positioned to offer some illuminating commentary on current political and economic conditions in his native United Kingdom, as well as in Europe and the United States, which he does in a piece that appeared in the May 21 edition of The Financial Times. Certainly no alarmist, Schama remains circumspect on the issue of revolution — its potential and likelihood given the present disordered state.

Decorum notwithstanding, one cannot help but think that Schama’s historical comparisons assure his readers of one thing, which is best summed up in a famous statement by Mao Zedong: “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.”

Excellent, of course, if you’re among the put-upon majority who must now offer up a collective pound of flesh to cover the bad bets of a tiny plutocratic elite (whom writer David Rothkopf dubbed the “superclass” in an indispensible 2008 book of the same title); not so much if you happen to be … well … one of the plutocratic elite. Read the rest of this entry »

Appetite for Obstruction: Fattening Resistance to the Mortgage Crisis


Can Americans mount resistance to the depredations of Wall Street bankers simply by doing what they do best — stuffing themselves silly?

Sometimes I’m sad the bubble burst. Fortunately, Americans’ bubble-butts endure. ¶ The age of lenders pushing jumbo mortgages gave rise to eateries pushing jumbo portions — The Cheesecake Factory, as well as Claim Jumper, which I remember fondly from my salad days in Arizona (and when I went I was about the only one eating salad in the place). A California chain famous for its obscene portions and Gold Rush theme, Claim Jumper opened its doors in 1977. Its website promises that “when you step inside a Claim Jumper you will discover an environment that is warm and comfortable.” Which is quite true; patrons are greeted by roaring fireplaces and over-sized booths of  soothing faux mahogany. The lighting is low, and the exposed woodwork makes you feel as though you happened upon some Teutonic hunting lodge nestled deep in a fairytale forest.

The machinic din of masticating mandibles dispels all illusions of comfort and relaxation, however. Dining at Claim Jumper is work. The portions demand the utmost intestinal fortitude — and elasticity. Sandwiches like “The Motherlode” require that you consume pounds of ham, roast turkey, tri-tip, bread, pickles and Thousand Island dressing. The “Honey Blonde Fish and Chips” looks like half the seasonal haul of Portugal. Read the rest of this entry »

Class Struggle: Corporatized Higher Education and Symbolic Power


Are higher-learning credentials truly evidence of one’s knowledge and skills, or are they simply certificates of attendance?

April draws to a close, and upon its heels approaches May. As this happens, I find myself in the midst of a change of seasons, professionally speaking. The sun is setting on my career as a university instructor, which in one form or another (graduate assistant or adjunct lecturer) I have been for ten years. The vagaries of adjunct life have left me without the prospect of teaching for the summer or fall terms, and I find myself lacking the motivation to approach other schools in the area, just to nail down a section (or two if I’m lucky) at a wage rate staggeringly incommensurate with my level of education. (This sentiment is rooted not so much in personal vanity as personal finances. I’ve loans to pay back, you see, for the privilege of living essentially as a journeyman forced to wander from one smithy of the intellect to the next peddling my skills.) ¶ I can’t say that I’m sorry to leave teaching. Quite the contrary. I couldn’t wait to get out. I’d only stuck with it for this long because circumstances in my life were such that I required and could afford part-time work, and because a certain natural inertia was in play. I’d been teaching long enough to have streamlined my course content and its delivery, which makes me feel kind of like a comedy tour comic. He leaves Vegas to take his act on the road. Every new audience means new life for his jokes.

It became apparent to me early on that I was temperamentally unsuited for teaching. I attended one of those pressure-cooker prep schools as a teenager, one which placed great store by the college acceptance rates of its graduates. Anything less than 100 percent acceptance the school deemed an abject failure, if for no other reason that a lesser showing severely crimped how much tuition it could demand from parents the following academic year. Encouraged to keep students’ eyes on the prize, the faculty of my high school turned university into an object of veneration. The “cult of college” instilled in us all the awe and fear for institutions of higher learning of the sort which folks usually reserve for their Maker. We were regaled with cautionary tales about the hazards of university life, which were nothing short of Bunyanesque. Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond lurked on campuses throughout the nation, threatening to ensnare us, and, even if we prevailed against them, we still had university professors with whom to contend. To us students the latter were represented as a sort of priest class, aloof and concerned more with the health of their chosen discipline than with the conditions of the minds and hearts of the genuflecting faithful. The austerities of my prep school, in short, existed to discipline us to the realities of university matriculation. So mote it be. Read the rest of this entry »

The Safety of Objects: Design and “Inverted Totalitarianism”


Does the ideology of design truly deliver on its promise of a democratization of aesthetics, or does it mire people more fixedly in the dreary procedures of consumerism?

Sunt lacrimae rerum. – Virgil

Recently I found opportunity to watch Objectified, a 2009 documentary by filmmaker Gary Hustwit, whose previous outing, Helvetica (2007), peeled back the many-layered mystery of that ubiquitous font style. (Who’d have thought Helvetica, or “Helvetty” as Hipster Runoff’s Carles calls it, would prove so revolutionary? Send words out sans serif and liberate nations!) Hustwit brings must the same sensibility to Objectified that he did to Helvetica, one which consists of extended montages while plinky-plonky indie rock drones on in accompaniment. ¶ I requested Objectified from Netflix because I thought it might offer some incisive critical commentary on design and designy things. I figured that any self-respecting documentarian wouldn’t put himself to the trouble of making a film if he lacked interest in closely scrutinizing his subject. What purpose do documentaries serve, after all, if not to present the sort of sustained and objective (admittedly a fraught term) treatment otherwise lacking in popular media generally? Documentaries ought to be a countervailing force against the marketing slogan, the sound bite. Objectified, unfortunately, does not live up to this expectation. It makes a pretense of objectivity, but mostly Objectified takes an uncritical, even loving, approach to its subject. Many feet of film (or perhaps megabytes of memory) are spent in lavish regard for design and the fingerprints it leaves all over both public and private space. In this respect, Objectified leaves one with the impression of its being more a visual love letter to designers and other luminaries of the creative class — many of whom appear in the film — than a documentary, properly speaking.

My experience viewing Objectified I can best describe as one of irritation shading into revulsion. The self-indulgence of leaving the camera trained on objects undergoing manufacture annoyed me, but I chalked it off to it being sort of cinematic Hamburger Helper — filler meant to extend what is really quite meager conceit. My annoyance turned to revulsion, however, precisely as a consequence of the attritive effect of these very scenes. In their frequency and duration, these scenes helped (quite unintentionally I’m sure) the film effect a sort of deconstructive jump in place: Certain implications quite other to the filmmaker’s design (pun intended) began to as it were peek through that which actually appeared on the screen. The effect of this rather reminded me of some ideas of the French theorist Pierre Macherey, who in his 1966 work For a Theory of Literary Production identifies two registers inhering in all literary discourse: the “spoken” and the “unspoken.” This is so because literary texts “say what they do not say,” an admittedly cryptic way of expressing the idea that the particular way of wording the literary representation of some subject is at the same time a suppression of other ways of wording, and thus, of representing, this same subject. The latter are banished to “the margins” of the literary text. The actual wording appearing on the page stands as simply one rendering among myriad possible others, yet one which becomes valorized (in the Marxian sense) simply by virtue of actually being  on the page. Criticism conducted in the spirit of Macherey, then, is an act of recuperation; the “spoken,” i. e., the literary representation appearing on the page, presents a point of entry through which the many marginalized other significations can be accessed in order to be brought dialectically to bear on the former — in order to produce what the French Marxist thinker (and uxorcide) Louis Althusser (who was Macherey’s teacher) calls a “symptomatic reading.” Read the rest of this entry »

You Forgot It in People: The Enduring Allure of “The Tragedy of the Commons”


Is “The Tragedy of the Commons” a parable about the real dangers of commonly held property, or a legitimating narrative for an elite class whose existence depends on private property?

A perfect tragedy should … imitate actions which excite pity and fear. — Aristotle

Like a bad penny, that hoary old heuristic known as “The Tragedy of the Commons” (hereafter TragCom) keeps turning up. Recently, it popped up on Business Insider‘s weblog Clusterstock, in an April 4, 2010 piece by Joe Wiesenthal. (The photograph of Ayn Rand accompanying Wiesenthal’s text should’ve scared me off, but I soldiered on anyway.) ¶ Wiesenthal applies the lessons of TragCom to the almighty American dollar. Our currency is the commons, you see, and, as such, it threatens to go the way of all commons: to — you guessed it — tragedy. ¶ But before I proceed further, I should offer a bit of background. TragCom goes roughly like this: Any resource to which people have common title will inevitably become exhausted. Therefore, only abrogation of this common title can prevent these resources’ depletion.

One of the simplest and most effective sorts of abrogation is privatization of common property. Granting title to resources to a few individuals, or even one person, encourages sound resource stewardship, because the titleholders now have incentive to manage these resources carefully, as personal (rentier) profit at stake. As for the rest of those one-time title holders who have found their title voided, they can go suck stones if they can’t appreciate that turning the commonwealth into one or a few’s plain old wealth protects every concerned party’s interests. Read the rest of this entry »

The Uncommercial Traveler: A Review of Helen Rappaport’s Conspirator: Lenin in Exile


Conspirator: Lenin in Exile
by Helen Rappaport
Basic Books, 416 pp. ISBN: 978-0465013951

Late in his career, before he succumbed to a fatal illness, French poststructuralist historian and theorist Michel Foucault turned his scholarly attention to ethics. He found particularly interesting the idea, rooted in classical antiquity, of ascesis, a term related to today’s words ascetic and asceticism. This interest in ethics represents a surprising development in the general trajectory of Foucault’s previous inquiries. Foucault had long devoted himself to expelling humanistic biases from the theory and practice of writing history, even going so far as to declare, with Nietzsche-like flamboyance: “It is comforting … and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.” According to Foucault, “man” as a concept wandered onto the world-historical stage only late in the present act, and will likely at some future point disappear à la Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s Hamlet — obscurely and with little fanfare, ado, or even remark. ¶ If Foucault proclaimed himself no fan of this arriviste concept “man,” what, then, could have possibly impelled his thought toward ethics, toward the particular issue of ascetic self-transformation? (Eric Paras takes up this very question in his 2006 book Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, which, despite its regrettable title, offers ample — and refreshingly accessible — contextualization for Foucault’s Kehre) Indeed, Foucault’s ethical turn leads him to introduce some unwonted vocabulary into his writing: words like “spirituality” and “truth.” And to all appearances he uses them unironically.

Such a volte-face would surely discombobulate devotees of someone whose conception of history residual Frankfurt-Schoolman (and implacable critic of all things poststructuralist) Jürgen Habermas has characterized as a “chaotic multitude” and “an iceberg covered with the crystalline forms of arbitrary formations.” Foucault himself offered a clue as to what incited him to discourse on this unlikely later subject. “The idea of the bios [i.e., the human organism] as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is something that fascinates me,” he states in a 1983 interview:

The idea also that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure. All that is very interesting.

Foucault fastened onto the possibility of aesthetic self-fashioning with one’s very own organismic life as the expressive medium, and ethics as the technique of this expression. The fact that to Foucault’s thinking ethics can instantiate themselves independently — or, indeed, in defiance of — juridical norms, as well as authoritarian system or disciplinary structure to enforce these norms, argues for ethics primacy, and thus also for its strength as a structure for existence. Read the rest of this entry »

6.4 Equals Makeout: Facebook and Algorithmic Relationships


Are online relationships in danger of losing their character as human relationships as Facebook and other social media assume greater power in mediating them?

Facebook makes me uneasy. Signing up for it didn’t fill me with much enthusiasm (a career counselor recommended that job seekers begin a Facebook page in order “to network”), and I find myself logging onto it less frequently these days. The year or so I’ve belonged to the site has proven generally depressing. My opinion of certain people I know has changed — and not for the better — as a consequence of the trivialities and inane sentiments they regularly broadcast. I became party to a pathetic sort of high-school class cyber-reunion, having had my whereabouts discovered by former classmates whom I really rather wished would’ve left me alone. And I have constantly to ignore solicitations sent by others to participate in asinine surveys (all the while feeling like a jerk for doing so). But a few days ago, Facebook dealt me a blow that sent me reeling. It suggested that I befriend none other than my ex-wife.

Knowing that Facebook’s algorithms function according to relative degrees of separation, I quickly began searching my Facebook friends’ friends lists to discover who among my contacts had played Judas by befriending the former Mrs. Steinpilz. I came up empty in my search; no one I’d suspected actually stood guilty of this betrayal. Then I remembered that a year ago I had contacted my ex-wife through Facebook’s internal e-mail system after she failed to return an earlier e-mail I sent her over the Internet inquiring into some writing of mine in her possession. This single e-mail exchange — tersely polite but anything but cordial — apparently constituted enough of an affiliation for Facebook to encourage a more permanent bond. Read the rest of this entry »

Guido Bandido: MTV’s The Jersey Shore and Neoliberalism


Does The Jersey Shore, MTV’s latest pop-cultural sensation, purport to reveal the ways of East Coast “Guidos” and “Guidettes” or the ways of neoliberal economics?

To anyone living outside the northeastern United States, MTV’s The Jersey Shore, the cable network’s latest reality-television offering, is an encounter with the strange and unfamiliar. In my own experience as someone born in the Rust Belt, reared in the Midwest and educated in the Southwest, seldom did I encounter so-called “Guidos” and “Guidettes.” I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with “Guido” stereotypes; they were just rather remote from my experience — until I moved to New England, that is. Here the landscape crawls with Guidos. One can usually find them on the main drag of my neighborhood, leaning on Katana bikes and menacing popped-collared Ivy Leaguers. Or one can find them at the beach, again leaning against said Katana bikes.

Casually observing Guidos while conducting my own life’s business revealed to me nearly nothing about their folkways. MTV’s The Jersey Shore therefore held for me all the exotic appeal of an ethnographic document. Yet I have to say that after having watched the entire season run the show disappointed rather than satisfied my curiosity. The Guido demimonde does have its peculiarities (the impression I got of it is that of traditional family-centered Italian-American culture to which elements of hip-hop culture have been superadded), but these were relatively minor, and ultimately incidental, compared to the actual premise of the show, which seems to be: find people who like to drink, screw and fight; put them in a position to drink, screw and fight; and then film them drinking, screwing and fighting. This premise certainly holds some amusement value, but only so much. In fact, I found myself forgetting that the reason I was watching the show was to glimpse the unique customs of East Coast Guidos and Guidettes, because the incidents and escapades the show’s subjects found themselves in I found immediately — and depressingly — familiar. Read the rest of this entry »